“Humph!” his wife snorted. “Mavra Chang, always Mavra Chang. It’s an obsession with you! Look, she’s deformed—she couldn’t run a ship even if you put her in charge. No hands, face always looking down. She can’t even feed herself. Better face it, Antor, dear. There is no way of ever returning to that glittering bauble of yours up there in the sky, and no way anybody else can, either—particularly not Mavra Chang!”

“I wish I had your confidence,” he responded glumly. “Yes, it’s true I’m obsessed with her. She’s the most dangerous antagonist I ever faced. Tiny little slip of a girl—not much bigger than Parmiter’s owl-faced apes. And yet, she managed to get devices of incredible complexity past my detectors—and they were the best you could buy! Then she slipped into Nikki Zinder’s prison, past all but a couple of the guards, talked one guard into deserting with her, and managed to steal a ship and not get shot down by my robot sentinels—they’re still up there, too, you know—by knowing a password based on a system only I could possibly know. How? Because she was in league with that goddamned computer of Zinder’s, that’s how! It’s self-aware, you know! It’s the only answer. That means I haven’t the slightest idea whether or not she really could get back through to that computer if she ever managed to get back up there! Even Yulin might have problems getting by the sentinels, but she won’t! And her mind’s so strange, so unfathomable, that no one knows what she’d do with that kind of power. She’s vicious and vengeful, I know that. I lost a number of good syndicate hit men once when they killed her husband. I know what she’d like to do to me!”

Burodir shifted. She’d heard it all before. “But she won’t!” she pointed out. “There’s no way for anybody to get up there!”

“There’s a perfectly preserved ship in the North,” he retorted. “I ought to know—Ben and I crashed in it.”

“But in a nontech hex populated by beings so alien they don’t even understand what it is, and won’t permit any other race to move it,” she continued. “And, besides, it’s impossible for a Southerner to go beyond North Zone. You know that. Any Zone Gate on the Well World, North or South, just brings you back to Makiem. You can’t get beyond North Zone!”